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Month: June 2011

This sort of information needs to be shouted from every rooftop in America. Americans should know the just how the economy has been manipulated to allow such an income disparity between the rich and the middle class and working poor.

What part of “grossly inequitable” does the GOP not understand? Income levels between the working class and the “well off” should have never gotten to this point.

One could call it greed, which is bad enough and considered one of the seven deadly sins, but this goes beyond greed, these numbers show that the GOP is complicit with corporations in sabotaging our Democracy by making corporations the most powerful “people” in America! My question is…to what end?

After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:

“Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. …The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented.”

The New York Times adds, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.”

Statement from MSNBC:
Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.

Statement from Mark Halperin:
I completely agree with everything in MSNBC’s statement about my remark. I believe that the step they are taking in response is totally appropriate.

Again, I want to offer a heartfelt and profound apology to the President, to my MSNBC colleagues, and to the viewers. My remark was unacceptable, and I deeply regret it.

Which is it Michele Bachmann? Are you dumber than a fifth-grader or are you too cocky to give a damn about copyright infringement? Given the fact that you are an attorney, I’m sure you have heard of that term.

However, Politico covers for you, by noting that you may not have received the cease and desist letter yet, so we’ll wait and see…

Humanity Also on Chopping Block

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Speaking on behalf of congressional Republicans, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said today that trillions could be cut from the Federal budget if Congress can agree to eliminate empathy.

“The current budget is bursting at the seams with pet projects that reek of empathy,” Rep. Cantor said. “As a nation, we can no longer afford to spend money on people’s basic survival needs like a bunch of drunken sailors.”

“We Americans should get out of the habit of using Greek words,” he added. “Look where it’s gotten the Greeks – straight into bankruptcy.”

Once congressional Republicans eliminate such empathy-laden budget items as lunches for poor children, medicine for the indigent and oxygen for seniors, Rep. Cantor said, “We can move from cutting empathy to cutting humanity.”

With humanity removed from the budget, he said, “That’s where the real savings come in.”

By eliminating the food, medicine and oxygen necessary to sustain human life, “We will reduce the single biggest drain on the U.S. economy: people.”

Ending on an optimistic note, Rep. Cantor said that by eliminating people, “by the middle of this century the United States will be successfully transformed into one big unmanned Predator drone.”

So long, “Glenn Beck Show”! We’ve had so much fun with you since you began your hysterical, racist campaign against the president and organizations that have black people in them or that are somehow dedicated to helping minorities and underprivileged people as part of a world domination plot devised by Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky and Woodrow Wilson. But now it’s time for your daily hour on cable TV to come to an end. Today will be Beck’s last show on Fox News.

Before he went to Fox News, Beck was just a talk radio hack on CNN Headline News with a “funny take” on the news of the day. But on Fox he distinguished himself with unreconstructed full-on John Bircherism, borrowed wholesale from O.G. Bircher Cleon Skousen, modernized with shamelessly racial attacks on contemporary liberal organizations and an obsession with George Soros.

Because his show was so far to the right of the mainstream that it made the rest of Fox’s programming look suddenly reserved by comparison, everyone in the lamestream media spent a lot of time putting Beck on the front pages of magazines and helping him to promote his various moneymaking ventures. (The liberal media expounded a great deal of energy on trying to show people just how fringey Beck’s entire worldview is, to some success.)

We’ll never forget his blackboards and on-screen graphics exposing just how far the great Progressive Conspiracy goes (spoiler: all the way to the top), even though most of us will now go back to not being particularly worried about the modern-day influence of Walter Lippmann.

President Obama’s birth certificate is out but the birthers aren’t going away: Two prominent birthers are suing Esquire magazine for defamation and damaged business interests.

The complaint by Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily, and Jerome Corsi, author of Where’s the Birth Certificate? stems from an Esquire parody, headlined “BREAKING! Jerome Corsi’s Birther Book Pulled From Shelves!”

The magazine published the article on its website after President Obama released his birth certificate; many people, however, took it for straight news and the site had to add a note beginning “We committed satire this morning.”

In a statement to Forbes, Esquire notes that the article was marked “humor” and that satire is “an age-old and completely legitimate form of expression.”

– Conservatives are too greedy to share, too filled with hate to love their fellow-man; has no clue what the word “sacrifice means”; and the only good deeds they understand is donating millions to GOP PACs to make sure Dems don’t win in any elections.

Yes, that’s right: according to Missouri congressman and Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin, “at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God and a belief that government should replace God.” Rep. Akin, welcome to the wingnut pantheon. (For more choice examples of political lunacy, idiocy and extremism, click through to the Wingnut Watch photo gallery.)

According to the National Employment Law Project, as of 2008 Florida had average weekly unemployment benefit amounts not just lower than the national average, but lower than the Southern average and just 32% of its jobless workers received benefits, below the national average of 37%. So naturally the thing to do would be to weaken Florida’s unemployment insurance system, which is just what Gov. Rick Scott and the state legislature have done.

Monday, Scott signed a bill cutting the number of weeks unemployed people receive benefits, tying it to the unemployment rate, and making it more difficult to qualify for benefits in the first place.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2012, the number of available state benefit weeks is reduced from 26 to 23 and the number of available state benefit weeks is tied to the unemployment rate on a sliding scale. If unemployment rate is 5 percent or lower, for example, the number of available weeks is 12. If the unemployment rate is 10.5 percent or higher, the number of available weeks is 23.

Basically, this is about cutting taxes for employers:

Republicans in both Houses argued the bill was critical to protecting Florida’s business climate. The measure also supports Scott’s budget plan to reduce unemployment taxes for employers by $630.8 million.

That’s just one of several corporate tax cuts Scott and Republicans in the legislature have pushed. No word on who’s supposed to patronize Florida businesses given the state’s 10.6% unemployment rate coupled with tightening unemployment insurance.

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A “sophisticated” cyber-hack has crippled al Qaeda’s online communication networks, a terrorism expert said on Wednesday.

The attack, which will cut the terror cell’s ability to communicate for at least a few days, was pulled off with “an unusual cocktail of relatively sophisticated techniques.”

The strike has the hallmarks of a government operation and it mirrors a recent hack by the British government that left cupcake recipes in the place of bomb-making instructions on the group’s English language magazine.

When trying to figure out where presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) gets her stringent, anti-gay views, you only have to look as far as her husband. Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who has described himself as his wife’s “strategist,” runs a Christian-based counseling center in Minnesota that has been rumored to offer reparative treatment for those looking to “ungay” themselves.

Just last summer, Dr. Bachmann explained his position on homosexuality while offering theoretical advice to parents concerned that one of their children was gay.

BACHMANN: We have to understand: barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature. We have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps…

And let’s face it: what is our culture, what is our public education system doing today? They are giving full, wide-open doors to children, not only giving encouragement to think it but to encourage action steps. That’s why when we understand what truly is the percentage of homosexuals in this country, it is small. But by these open doors, I can see and we are experiencing, that it is starting to increase.